World Wide Web

Last updated on June 26, 1996

BACK: Telnet About the Author TOP: Table of Contents

The WWW (World Wide Web) was originally developed at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland in 1992. CERN stands at the hub of the World Wide Web. The NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) stands at the hub of the WWW in the United States.

The WWW is the newest, most popular and most rapidly expanding part of the Internet. It was originally devised as a means to browse through hypertext documents. Hypertext documents are written in a computer language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language), a subset of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), used in the publishing industry to do laser phototypesetting. It would seem natural, then, that the Internet would refer to HTML documents as WWW pages.

Hypertext documents can contain text, images, sound and video clips, and links to other hypertext documents. Hypertext links can point to sites anywhere on the Internet worldwide. Hypertext document links allow simple point-and-click navigation. A hypertext link looks like THIS. To follow a link all you need to do is to click once on it with the left mouse button to go to the site or document location associated with that link. Hypertext links are usually underlined and in blue when unvisited. They may change to being underlined and in red after having been visited. Think of links marked visited like Hansel and Gretel's trail of crumbs through the forest. It's there to help you navigate back to a place you visited before. Click on the - THIS - link above to see what happens.

A hypertext link automatically contacts the Internet site where the the linked document is located, specifies the correct transfer protocol and requests the site to transmit all the information contained within the linked document to your PC. Any data on the linked page, text, images, sounds and video clips, are transmitted automatically to your Internet browser which formats them on-the-fly and displays them on your computer screen. Read the document, view the graphics, hear the sounds, etc., and then follow any interesting links on the page to other hypertext documents. This is called Surfing the Net. You're hanging ten!

All browsers allow you to set a bookmark at any hypertext document you've visited - universally referred to on the Internet as Web pages. Any bookmarks you set on Web pages you've visited are saved in a bookmark file associated with your browser. Your bookmarks are accessible to you and are totally under your control. Using bookmarks is a good way to get back to places you've visited that you liked a lot and would like to go back to again and again without having to follow Hansel and Gretel's trail or marked links through the forest.

Surfing the Net is easy and fun. All you need is one of the commercially available or free- or shareware GUI (Graphical User Interface - pronounced gooey) Internet browsers. Beware - all GUI browsers do not have the same oomph. Some have much more powerful display and file-handling features than others. The HotJava, MicroSoft Internet Explorer, Mosaic and Netscape browsers are the most powerful and flexible, but the Netscape browser is, by far, the most popular. You should make sure that whatever browser you select can properly address Netscape HTML extensions and that it supports the Java language, as well.

You can access the Internet using a text-based browser called LYNX, developed at the University of Kansas. The LYNX text-based Internet browser is available on many mainframe VAX and Unix computer systems. If you have an account on such a large computer system you may be able to use LYNX from your own personal account. If not, you can always use the anonymous LYNX login site at the University of Kansas using telnet from your Internet browser. All you need to do is login as WWW.

Although its capabilities are primitive compared to the GUI browsers, LYNX can be a useful tool if you're just after text - and there is a lot of electronic text available on the Internet. Don't underestimate the value of the LYNX text-based browser for pure text. If you do have access to a provider that offers it to you as an option for using the Internet, give it a try.

Your Internet Service Provider should supply you will either its own proprietary GUI Graphical User Interface) Internet browser or with the commercial Netscape GUI Internet browser and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) software. The service provider must be able to assign your computer an IP (Internet Protocol) address on-the-fly when you dial in or assign you a permanent IP address.